Here is my prediction for New Hampshire: It settles nothing. Despite the most intense eight days of the campaign so far, New Hampshire will end the way it started. Donald Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) will win comfortably. New Hampshire will fail to play the role it has so often, that of winnowing the field, and its reputation as a place for dramatic comebacks will be tarnished: A Trump win won’t count for much of a turnaround after his second-place win in Iowa.
Trump has been more lucky than good in New Hampshire. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie did the wet work on Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and left him as flummoxed as Arnold Schwarzenegger in this scene from “Total Recall.” Rubio, like Schwarzenegger, thought he could sneak through by repeating the same talking points, but he got caught, and what followed wasn’t pretty. Advantage: Trump, because any coalescing around Rubio as the Trump alternative is stalled.
So Rubio’s implosion means the “establishment” lane remains open on the Republican side. My guess is that everyone except Ben Carson heads south. Cruz will come back to life in South Carolina, too, with its evangelical voters. Trump will face more scrutiny, perhaps on his draft record of deferments in a state with a strong military service heritage. But I am done betting against him; he has smashed too many crystal balls, including mine. The longer the field stays big, the better he will do, since he seems to have a solid hold on 30 to 35 percent of the Republican vote.
On the Democratic side, as expected, Sanders will win and likely by a large enough margin that it will meet the high expectations for his performance. More interesting than the results of the New Hampshire primary is that it has cast the die for the Democratic race moving forward. Sanders, with a large war chest and a growing national ground game, will continue to paint Clinton as the candidate of the corrupt status quo, unwilling — incapable, really — of making the changes necessary to restore economic fairness. Clinton will pull out all the stops, continuing to tarnish Sanders’s purity as a progressive by highlighting certain votes where he was on the “wrong” side, by questioning his ability to get anything done and by using her surrogates (namely, her husband) to hold him accountable for some of the extreme negativity of his supporters.
If New Hampshire tells us anything, it is that this race will go on for a long time.
